Notes from last night...

"She wants to live with me, the woman in the long black cocktail dress with her hands around my shoulders..."

"I've just moved here," I say to someone else, slamming the 5 sideways into the corner pocket. I'd told them I sucked at pool. I didn't lie: that's my only skill shot.

And then she's on me like my long lost lesbian lover. Move in. Play a game with me. Buy me a drink.

But there was no need for that last one; she snatched up every stray glass in the bar.
"Can I have a drink of your beer?" she asks me once.
"No. Yours is sitting right over there."
"Good call."

At one point Dave returns from the bar with a stack of napkins.
"I asked you for coasters," I sigh, and snap the cap off my pen.
She sees me. She slides the whole length of herself up against me.
"What are you writing?"
"I'm taking notes."
"Take a note. Write it. Write a note. Can I have some of your drink? Why aren't you writing?"
So I write, "Still here--this saloon,"
I meant to take a note about the bouncer who chewed holes in the door frame back in the seventies. This is a place with visible history; my favorite kind of dive. But all she reads is "still here" and she thinks I'm writing her life story.
"Still here is right," she says, trying to snatch up my hand from off my arm. "Still here. I'm still here."
I take dictation: "still not working much" "its too much work" then with out quotation marks, though I'm still quoting her, blah blah blah.

She's still there now. Her teeth marks are on the wall. A permanent fixture like the deer head hanging off the wall. Not aging, perhaps, but covered in dust. Visible history.